Amazon's London Datacenters Now Open for Business

Earlier this month, Amazon Web Services (AWS) planted its flag in Canada with the launch of a new cloud region in Ontario. This week, it's expanding its footprint on the other side of the Atlantic.

AWS on Wednesday announced the launch of its newest region in London, England. It offers two availability zones and is AWS' third European region, next to Frankfurt and Ireland.

"Our AWS Europe (London) Region is open for business now and we are excited to offer a complete portfolio of services -- from our foundational service stack for compute, storage, and networking to our more advanced solutions and applications," wrote Amazon.com CTO Werner Vogels in a blog post.

In total, AWS now has 16 active regions worldwide with 42 availability zones (with each availability zone containing one or more datacenters). It also has plans to open regions in Paris and China by the end of 2017. A map of AWS' global cloud infrastructure is posted here.

According to AWS evangelist Jeff Barr in a blog post, the London region supports the C4, D2, M4, T2 and X1 instance families, as well as a wide array of AWS services, including DynamoDB, Redshift, Kinesis and CloudWatch.

Vogels noted that London -- and the United Kingdom in general -- is ripe for an expansion of AWS' cloud footprint, given the wide variety of industry, public sector and financial services customers and partners located there.

"U.K. companies are using AWS to innovate across diverse industries, such as energy, manufacturing, medicaments, retail, media and financial services and the U.K. is home to some of the world's most forward-thinking businesses," he wrote, adding, "The British government is also helping to drive innovation and has embraced a cloud-first policy for technology adoption."

"With the launch of the AWS Europe (London) Region, AWS can enable many more U.K. enterprise, public sector and startup customers to reduce IT costs, address data locality needs, and embark on rapid transformations in critical new areas, such as Big Data analysis and Internet of Things," Vogels said.

About the Author

Gladys Rama is the senior site producer for RCPmag.com and senior editor of AWSInsider.net.